“In the United States, 5,000 people die a year because of doctor’s bad handwriting,” he said. “It’s very simple. You go to the doctor, and he writes the prescription in the computer, and you go to any pharmacy in the country, and you stick your card in the reader, and you identify yourself, and you get your prescription.”
As he pointed out repeatedly, “the stumbling blocks are not technological,” but rather, are bureaucratic.
In many ways, the European Union is far more federated than the United States. After all, there are 28 nation-states, each with their own languages and traditions that have bound themselves together in a loose political union that has a (mostly) unified economy and freedom of movement, and yet they have their own bureaucratic systems in most cases. But that’s slowly starting to change.
Late last year, Estonia and Finland became the first two countries to open up a cross-border data exchange, which makes such transfer seamless. This, for example, would allow an Estonian in Finland, and vice versa, to access services (such as prescriptions) away from home with no issue.
“You have different countries and different countries subsidizing different drugs to different degrees, so you have to balance all that out, so people don’t go cross-border for arbitrage,” the president said. “Finland and Estonia are now working together on Version 7 [of X-Road], it would allow us to use all of these services across border, across the countries, at least across Northern Europe. I say Northern Europe, because I don’t think the rest of Europe is too keen on these kinds of things.”
He just wants to spend €0.99, is that so much to ask?
What Estonia and Finland are doing is a step towards the DSM—but there remain all kinds of national-level laws that stop Europe from being truly unified.